Category: Toon Boom Animation

If I have an activate Toon Boom license before restoring my hard drive of my Windows computer to a previous system image, I can't return the license to the Toon Boom after the restore. (If I forget to return the license before the doing the restore – if it is at all possible).

The license is stuck, but there is a way to remove it.

Instead of running the license wizard through the UI….

…run the ClientActivation executable from an elevated DOS command prompt instead. Doing it this way will give you a Delete button to remove the license after the return fails.

1) Start an elevated (Run as administrator) cmd prompt.
2) Go to the directory where Toon Boom resides.
3) Type the following at the prompt ClientActivation.exe -advanced

The Delete button will appear disabled, but after the return fails, the Delete button will be enabled. Click the Delete button and it will remove the license.

From my experience, the best kind of image to import into Toon Boom Animate for vectorization is a PDF file.

Here is my scenario.

I exported an image I drew in Toon Boom Studio and saved it to different images types (bmp, jpg, png, tga, pdf).
Next, I imported every image onto its own layer in Toon Boom Animate (Black and White and vectorization).
I then played around with each vector image and came to the conclusion that the PDF was the best to work with. Here’s why.

When I select the entire image, the ‘pencil selection’ property under ‘Tool Properties’ shows up to change the thickness of the lines which tells me that the PDF image retained the fact that I drew the image with a pencil and not a brush in Toon Boom Studio.

Why is this important to me? After selecting the entire drawing and then flattening, I can mouse wheel click each stroke and it selects only the stroke that I clicked (For cleanup purposes). The other imported images would end up selecting more than the line I cared about. Why did it do this? Again, because it appears that even though I drew the image with a pencil in Toon Boom Studio, all but the PDF exported the lines as a brush stroke.

Now, I could have converted the lines of the other imports from a brush to a pencil stroke in Toon Boom Animate, but it distorts the drawing a bit. That’s no good.

The only extra step I had to do though with the PDF import drawing was increase the thickness of the pencil lines. For some reason, the PDF export did not retain the pencil thickness. No big deal.

Issue: You have this record player. The record is round and rotates as you designed it. So far so good.

You attempt to skew the entire object (we are just going to skew the record for demonstration purposes) to give the impression of a camera angle.

The problem is that when you run the animation, the record does not spin correctly based on the record skew, but instead wobbles all over the place.

Instead of skewing the object, you the skew the camera instead. This way, the object, being the record on the record player, still rotates as designed. Skewing the camera imitates positioning the camera on the angle you desire to capture. The problem is that you can’t use the skew tools that you use for skewing objects. You must use the advance tools instead.

Where is this toolbar? See below

Now, we can skew our camera instead.

First, select the camera layer and create a key frame:

Select the skew in the advanced animation tools

So far, we should like this:

Now, hover the mouse over the yellow frame at the bottom and drag right. It should now look like this:

Using the skew for objects, adjust your record player, record, and record arm.

It should now look like this:

Notice how the purple background is skewed also. Just make sure the background extends your camera lens to hide the trick of skewing the camera.